Jason Oakley

I don't split it out into 30-60-90 day increments, but within that period, these are the things I'd suggest doing: 1. Get to know your product - get demo certified, the same as your AEs 2. Start building key relationships internally - have lots of 1:1s 3. Create battlecards for your top 2-3 competitors 4. Put your positioning on paper 5. Define a product launch process 6. Set up your internal communication channels 7. Perform a content audit and find the gaps that need filling 8. Gather the tools, templates, frameworks that will accelerate your success Another late edition to this (added after my presentation) is to create your own PMM Charter. This is a foundational document that lays out the goals and objectives for your product daprtment. It helps you create guardrails for your team around the things that are in your wheelhouse, which will come in handy as people start firing projects at you.

I'm still trying to master this one, but here is what I do. Create your PMM Charter With the input of your boss and other leaders in the company, you'll first want to define what PMM looks like at your org. This helps set the guardrails for what product marketing is repsonsible for at your org and what your main objectives are. This will take into consideration what the top priorities are for company leadership. Set out on a priority finding mission In your first month or so, you have the opportunity to have a ton of 1:1 conversations as a new employee. During these conversations, I ask everyone if they have any priorities or asks for product marketing. I use all of this to create a master list of all the internal priorities/projects that people would "like" my team to focus on. I also like to do a content audit, focusing on all of the collateral that's leveraged throughout the sales cycle. I'll map the existing assets to the sales process and try to uncover gaps, or things that need updating. After all of the steps above, you'll likely have a sizeable list of competing projects that you need to prioritize. Some factors to include in how you weight each project: * What impact can this have on revenue and how soon? * Is it tied to an existing deadline, like an upcoming product launch? * Who is requesting it? Is the CEO asking for this, or is it a one-off request from a sales rep? * Does it fall within your charter, or is it outside the scope of product marketing at your org? * Where does it fit into your strategic objectives for that year, quarter, etc. I would map this all out in a spreadsheet or project board and circulate it between a few key stakeholders in the company, ie. your boss, Head of Product, Head of Sales, Head of CS, the CEO, etc. You could even send them the raw list and ask them to rank it in terms of priority. Using this feedback I'd create your final, prioritized project list. They key is to then make it available to everyone in your company so everyone can see where things fall and why. 

1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with competitive content is driving you win rates up. 2. Influenced deals Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are influencing revenue. 3. Sales confidence Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging. 4. New product revenue If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch. A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that your team is killing it. 

They know very little about our market, product, and competitors, and haven't really made an effort to learn. One way to stand out in the interview process is to show that you have a solid understanding of what the company does. If you can confidently speak about their competitors, talk about their product, show you understand their market, you will impress them. They'll have confidence in your ability to hit the ground running, and you'll show you took the initiative to learn about their space. When I can tell that a candidate knows little about what we do, I: 1. Worry about how long it'll take for them to start executing 2. Feel like they don't care enough or have the common sense to prepare for the interview

A lot of this depends on the size, stage, and goals of the company, but here's how I suggest approaching prioritization. Create your PMM Charter With the input of your boss and other leaders in the company, you'll first want to define what PMM looks like at your org. This helps set the guardrails for what product marketing is repsonsible for at your org and what your main objectives are. This will take into consideration what the top priorities are for company leadership. Set out on a priority seeking mission In your first month or so, you have the opportunity to have a ton of 1:1 conversations as a new employee. During these conversations, I ask everyone if they have any priorities or asks for product marketing. I use all of this to create a master list of all the internal priorities/projects that people would "like" my team to focus on. I also like to do a content audit, focusing on all of the collateral that's leveraged throughout the sales cycle. I'll map the existing assets to the sales process and try to uncover gaps, or things that need updating. After all of the steps above, you'll likely have a sizeable list of competing projects that you need to prioritize. Some factors to include in how you weight each project: * What impact can this have on revenue and how soon? * Is it tied to an existing deadline, like an upcoming product launch? * Who is requesting it? Is the CEO asking for this, or is it a one-off request from a sales rep? * Does it fall within your charter, or is it outside the scope of product marketing at your org? * Where does it fit into your strategic objectives for that year, quarter, etc. I would map this all out in a spreadsheet or project board and circulate it between a few key stakeholders in the company, ie. your boss, Head of Product, Head of Sales, Head of CS, the CEO, etc. You could even send them the raw list and ask them to rank it in terms of priority. Using this feedback I'd create your final, prioritized project list. They key is to then make it available to everyone in your company so everyone can see where things fall and why.

I can't think of three good ones right now, so I'll give you two of my favourite: 1. Saying yes to everything When you come in as the first PMM, people are going to be throwing projects at you left and right. It's easy to say yes to everything, after all, who wants to say "no" in their first month on the job. But it's important to set the precedent that everything can't be your top priority right away. At Klue, I'm hopping on calls with as many people as I can and asking them for their top priorities/asks for PMM. At the same time, I'm very transparent that I'm building a project board of every priority that I'm going to be sharing internally. Then, with my boss and some other leaders across the org, I'll work to prioritize the list so everyone can see what's going to be worked on, when, and why. 2. Dissapearing into a hole A solo PMM is naturally a very autonomous role, so it can be easy to slink away into a dark hole while you work on a big project. Don't. Everything we do as PMMs should be collaborative, especially when you're new to an org. You should be getting feedback and iterating often. If you keep projects to yourself for too long, you run the risk of wasting huge amounts of time on something that doesn't work. And people will notice.

It's challenging because there are so many overlaps, but I think it boils down to clear, consistent communication. And maybe breaking it down into how you work (or don't work) together on a project-by-project level. For example, on a product release, your committee will likely include people from each of these teams. When you set out the plan for that launch it's important to clearly define who own what. After enough releases, you all should be in lock step for how you work together on those particular types of projects. Over time, apply this approach to other projects types and soon you'll start to carve out everyone's niche. In one case at my last company, we also worked with the product team to create a document outlining all of the responsibilities we "owned" or "supported". The idea being that each responsibility needed an owner, but it doesn't mean another team could be involved in a supporting role. If anything, it helped facilitate the conversation around who owned what. I'd also check out my previous answer about creating your PMM Charter. 

Assuming you were hired for this role, I think that this type of conversation should ideally happen before you accept the job. Asking a question like "what vision does the CMO, Founder, CEO, executive team, etc. have for this role?" Even just digging into the job description and asking for more detail. If their perception is something wildly different than yours, you might not want to take the job. But that doesn't really answer your question... So, if you find yourself in this position as a new PMM, I would start an internal campaign to educate your CEO, for example, on what PMM should look like. At Uberflip, we created a presentation for our executive team, outlining the role of PMM. We leveraged a bunch of content from the Pragmatic Institute at the time, to highlight the strategic jobs PMMs should be responsible for. We just started to raise our hand for some of the more strategic jobs in an effort to show how we could help impact the business in a more strategic way. The true way to change your CEO's mind is to show them what kind of impact your can have when you devote your time to real PMM work. All that said, you want to make sure your priorities match the CEOs. If you're off paving the way for Product Marketing and letting other projects that they deem important falls through the cracks, you won't be the PMM for long. 

This is a really great question, and something I think a lot of poeple struggle with. I've found this article from First Round Review really helpful. It's based on Molly Graham's concept of "Giving Away Your Legos." A quote from Molly – "If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months." They interviewed Molly on an episode of the In Depth Podcast as well. 

I actually did a presentation on this about a month ago, which you can watch here. I don't split it out into 30-60-90 day increments, but within that period, these are the things I'd suggest doing: 1. Get to know your product - if your sales team has demo training, consider going through the same process 2. Start building key relationships internally - have lots of 1:1s 3. Create battlecards for your top 2-3 competitors 4. Put your positioning on paper 5. Define a product launch process 6. Set up your internal communication channels 7. Perform a content audit and find the gaps that need filling 8. Gather the tools, templates, frameworks that will accelerate your success Another late edition to this (added after my presentation) is to create your own PMM Charter. This is a foundational document that lays out the goals and objectives for your product daprtment. It helps you create guardrails for your team around the things that are in your wheelhouse, which will come in handy as people start firing projects at you.